No One Is Stealing the ‘A’ Your Child ‘Worked So Hard For’

3 lies and 1 truth about grading in a crisis — and it’s always a crisis

I live in NYC. The city where more than 16,000 people have died from Covid-19, where a makeshift hospital was set up in Central Park and refrigerated trailers were used as temporary morgues.

It is the city where almost a million people lost their jobs in April. When remote learning started here, 100,000 public school students were homeless and 300,000 lacked devices.

In the midst of this cauldron of human suffering, there are parents who are angry at the city’s education department. Are they angry that more than two months into this, there are still thousands of kids without devices they were promised? Perhaps they are angry at budget cuts that will hit the most struggling schools hardest?

No. They are angry at policies replacing traditional grades with a simple rubric of needs improvement/meets standards during this crisis. They feel that something is being stolen from their children and that these policies — policies meant to reduce the harm to our most vulnerable students — are doing harm to their own kids.

Their concern is whether their children will get to keep their high grades and competitive edge in selective middle school and high school admissions.

It is not hard to find these parents. In fact, it can be harder to avoid them. In any education forum, these parents are the most vocal and confident.

Their outrage can overshadow the often apologetic questions from other parents about difficulties getting online or whether failing students will be held back.

I recently had the great misfortune to sit through a virtual town hall hosted by Senator John Liu on the impact of Covid-19 on our schools in which one of these parents after another dominated the discussion. Turns out many of them were associated with a group called Parent Leaders for Accelerated Curriculum and Education (PLACE NYC), which was very well-organized and prepared with a number of clear talking points.

These talking points amounted to a series of commonly accepted lies about what grades do and represent. Their defense of grades in the midst of a pandemic rests on an ugly, unstated truth.

Lies about grades

#1 — But my child worked so hard for that ‘A’, aka, grades measure effort and ability

Any time you find yourself in a forum with one of these parents, you will hear deeply emotional accounts of how their child studies for hours each night, hands in all of their assignments on time, and takes advantage of extra credit opportunities. You might hear about how this child started taking tutoring classes when they were just a small child.

Their children deserve their high grades. How could you possibly reduce that ‘A’ to a simple “meets standards”?

I would never doubt the truth of these accounts of their hard-working children.

But did the student who helped her younger siblings with their remote schooling while the parents went to work, but only got a ‘B’, work any less than that ‘A’ student? Is the ‘A’ of a student with parents able to help at home and freedom from economic insecurity equivalent to the ‘A’ of a student whose parents were just laid off or is completing assignments from her homeless shelter?

What about the child who didn’t have a device for the whole first month of remote learning and fell irreversibly behind?

The meritocratic judgment lurking behind this emphasis on how hard one’s individual child worked is that other, less successful children did not work hard.

Something about a pandemic lays bare the fallacy of such a claim. Everyone can see glaring inequalities in remote learning. They are daily, headline news.

But the assumption that grades accurately measure ability or effort has always been wrong. For large numbers of students, schooling is a constant crisis — no less real despite usually being invisible. That digital divide didn’t start the day they sent students home with laptops. Older children caring for younger siblings while parents work odd shift hours is not a new phenomenon.

Many students struggle with learning disabilities that require them to work twice as hard just to keep up — let alone to earn high grades. Other children are suffering from rising levels of anxiety and depression. And large numbers struggle to learn a second language at the same time that they are asked to master academic material.

Then, of course, there is the child whose parents spend time and money, not to mention leveraging their own networks and knowledge, to help them with the science fair project or the research report. There are the extra credit points assigned by desperate teachers for students who bring in desperately needed classroom supplies. There is the child whose mother doesn’t hesitate to write to the teacher and ask for an extension on a late assignment due to extenuating circumstances.

Unfortunately, I could go on for quite some time with this exercise. I am sure that there are children at good schools with top grades who work very hard. I am equally sure that there are children who are also working very hard, but not getting the same rewards.

Even in the best of times, grades measure privilege.

#2 — Grades give parents crucial feedback

One argument I’ve heard is that grades give parents crucial feedback on how their child is doing academically that a simple pass-fail assessment cannot.

Grades help parents understand, at a very general level, how their children are measuring up in relationship to a simplistic and often arbitrary standard. For some families, anything less than an ‘A’ will be cause for concern while other families are happy if their children maintain mostly ‘B’s.

But grades do not tell a parent whether their child writes fluently or struggles to get down a paragraph. They cannot explain whether your child is missing the mark in math class because they make simple computation errors or because they are not grasping critical mathematical concepts. They don’t tell you if your child is developing strong critical thinking skills or is simply very good at memorization and diligent in completing assignments.

The person who can give a parent this information is their child’s teacher. I have a child with an IEP (individualized education plan). One of the great advantages of this is that teachers are asked to pay attention to my child and to describe his strengths, interests, weaknesses, and struggles in detail.

He has an incredible teacher who was able to describe to me exactly where he was going wrong in solving multiplication problems using decimal numbers. Understanding this allowed us to both help him and to not get frustrated when he kept coming up with the wrong answer.

Grades cannot communicate these challenges. In fact, they provide illusory feedback that can create a cycle of frustration.

The entire premise of grades as feedback is that doing well in school is a simplistic formula of more effort = better results. A letter grade indicating that a child is not meeting standards has the intended consequence of communicating to a parent that their child should work harder. Our job is to pressure them to put in more effort in order to avoid a bad grade.

It’s a false premise.

If we do not know why our child is struggling, then we cannot help them. Instead, they are likely to become more anxious and internalize negative ideas about themselves.

Parents do deserve feedback on how their children are doing. And it is understandable that many parents feel anxious right now that their children may be falling behind. The answer to this is not to keep traditional grading but to give teachers extra time to provide meaningful feedback to parents about what their children are learning and how they are interacting with remote learning.

But a crucial part of what schools should be providing parents is reassurance — that these are unusual times and everyone has unique circumstances and we will work together to make sure everyone has the support that they need. Schools need to be relieving the pressure on parents. Assuring families that no children will fail or be judged by their academic performance during this time is a crucial part of that.

#3 — Grades motivate students

The third argument for grades is that they provide motivation for students to continue to push themselves.

Of course, grades can motivate students — in the short-term. But over time, studies show that reward systems like grades reduce intrinsic motivation, which is the most important and enduring kind of motivation. Intrinsic motivation stems from activities that are inherently rewarding for their own sake. This is true both for children who attain the rewards and for those who do not.

For children who are capable of meeting expectations, grades create a pleasurable experience in which they are rewarded for their efforts. Students who are motivated by these extrinsic rewards will look for the easiest ways to achieve them. This leads these high-performing, highly-motivated students to become quite adept at understanding teacher expectations, what kinds of performances are rewarded, and where shortcuts can be taken.

The focus shifts from the learning process to gaming the system. Studies show that students will focus on the grade rather than on any descriptive feedback a teacher might provide.

Meanwhile, for students who are struggling, the threat of poor grades is supposed to act as motivation to work harder. However, this presumes that the only reason a child is struggling is lack of effort. The reality is that children may experience struggles for a wide variety of reasons.

Being constantly punished for such struggles leads to catastrophic declines in motivation — and, more concerning, self-esteem. These students are more likely to detach from school entirely and to see it as a hostile place.

In this way, students who were always going to achieve are rewarded for that achievement, while students who needed more support are punished. It is not so much, then, that the grades are a motivator, but that they measure, reward, and punish already existing differences. In doing so, they exacerbate existing disparities.

One very ugly truth

The parents who are fighting to maintain existing grading systems during this crisis recognize one simple fact: grades are currency. They are used to rank and sort students in order to distribute privileges and scarce resources. It is not the ‘A’ that these parents resent losing. It is all the privileges that those grades bestow.

This is why they are outraged that the Department of Education is considering eliminating “screened admissions” for middle and high schools. NYC has the most segregated schools in the country. From the very earliest ages, practices like gifted and talented classes, selective middle schools that draw from a handful of elementary schools, and then screened high schools that select the top-performing students all combine to funnel those with the most advantages into a handful of elite schools.

Students at these schools receive a world-class education and dominate admissions to selective private colleges. Meanwhile, the vast majority of NYC students go to underperforming and segregated schools. Getting rid of traditional grades and eliminating screened admissions threatens to disrupt this status quo.

A petition arguing to keep the screens quotes a parent saying: “They want to dismantle the few good schools available to parents. Our kids have been working very hard and it is unfair that their efforts are being dismissed.”

Absent from this picture are the many students who are also working hard and suffering right now — students whose families presumably would also like the opportunity for their children to attend “good schools”.

The defense of grades has nothing to do with motivation, hard work, or providing feedback to families. It has everything to do with maintaining a system that has protected the privileges of a few at the expense of the many.

And in order to keep this unequal system in place, these parents are willing to fight to keep grading systems and admission standards that will further punish those who have most suffered during this crisis.